Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday November 03, 2015 @10:17AM
from the wish-it-was-open-source dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Following well over 50 developer snapshots and 4 technical previews (Alpha), the new browser upstart has hit its first Beta release today. Following almost a year of work on alpha, Vivaldi is coming out with many unique features such as tab stacking and tiling, notes, and quick commands for navigating and feature use. Other features are in the works, such as sync and built-in mail client that will be introduced when they hit a more stable state. It's a refreshing take on the browser: as many others are diverging to a common design template, Vivaldi is taking a more feature-rich and customization-heavy approach. (We linked to a hands-on report about Vivaldi earlier this year, too.)

Especially not one that looks like the UI was designed with MS Paint. Seriously... this [vivaldi.com] is what passes for a modern and aesthetically pleasing application these days?

The Notes feature sounds marginally useful, but that's already in Firefox via one of a dozen addons. Actually, all of their "killer features" exist already or could easily be implemented as addons for Firefox. Remind me again why I should change to an ugly Chromium clone without advertising or script blocking features?

Don't get me wrong -- Firefox is going to hell too, but it seems to be running a slightly slower race than other browsers. I'm not going to switch to a front-runner.

Some, maybe even most, of the Vivaldi developers' experiments will fail miserably. What counts is that they're shaking things up slightly, and that's a good thing. With Firefox and Chrome increasingly becoming a mutual admiration society and MS Edge looking like it'll end up just as shitty as its predecessor, another player in this horse-race might effect some positive changes.

Firefox has been relegated to the back burner for years now. It does a decent job as a development tool with Firebug, but otherwise it's pretty slow and clunky. And according to my task manager it still hasn't managed to figure out process separation for tabs.

I have now, but obviously hadn't when I posted my original comment. I saw the icon, but for all I knew it was just a custom version of ghostery that they'd added to the browser. Of course even your link says "it supports the majority of extensions published for Google Chrome", so who knows what works and what doesn't (though they do say uBlock appears to function, so that's good).

So perhaps it's on par with Chrome when it comes to extensions, but that almost makes me wonder even more what the point of Viv

Just an FYI, it supports all chrome extensions. Until this release it had a few bugs in that, but I'm currently testing it and everything works without issue so far. I really hope that it turns out to be completely compatible, and so far it looks like it is. Also, I'm surprised with how fast it runs.

Addons could be obsoleted, and never be updated.
Addons could be crashed, and not works each browser's update.
Addons could make browser much slower.

Not mention that somethings "easily be implemented as addons for Firefox" are not the same things (those) addons intend to be implemented.

Example, I use Opera 12 (Presto), one function that sometime I need is "Cached images", which is disable displaying, completely/partially load/not load images in webpages. Firefox has an addons called "imgLikeOpera", whic

Opera 12 has function of selecting any text on pages, include the links, by holding the mouse's left-button while moving cursor like text editor. There is a work-around solution in Opera-Chrome but cause some unwanted side-effect. Firefox, does not have this.

Maybe I'm following, but I usually copy snippets exactly like that; left button selecting some displayed text, in both current Opera and Chromium and Firefox(ESR). For precision I adjust the selection with shift arrows. Works in all browsers/engins I tried, including Vivaldi alfa.

What I really miss from the early browsers (up to IE5) is the half page scrolling using the keyboard (d/D iirc?). Today there's only the whole page scrolling by space/shift-space.

In Firefox and Chrome if you hold the mouse left-button and drag the cursor above a link, this will not work as you want.
In Opera (= 12), if mouse left-button was held long enough (less than a second), the browser knows that you want to select text instead of drag a link.

This project appears to specifically be after Opera users, whoever they are. From the "our story" page:"In 1994...Opera was born...Fast forward to 2015. The browser we once loved has changed its direction. Sadly....we came to a natural conclusion: we must make a new browser."

I do. I am still on Opera 12 as, frankly, all new current mainstream browsers have a really bad and broken UI, including any post-12 versions of Opera. Now Opera 12 mostly works fine today, but the number of sites broken with it is slowly increasing.

No, the focus should be on allowing the user to view, organize, and access the content in a way that is intuitive and convenient. Of course, the components of this ideal are vastly different across the user base - hence Firefox addons and 'about:config'. Firefox's market share has gone down as Mozilla has tried to force a more uniform, less configurable browser experience on their users - I doubt that a new browser with even less configurability is going to gain much traction.

I think ffx went down because users switched to chrome. if what your saying is correct and people wanted configurability, why would they be switching to chrome in the first place?? maybe ur wrong? just a question, not saying one way or the other.

>> Vivaldi is taking a more feature-rich and customization-heavy approach

No thanks - we already have this from Firefox (yuck) and to a lesser extent Chrome. Give us the ability to shut off Flash animations and HTML5 video by default on our browser and you'll have millions of downloads.

Presumably all repeat downloads by the same 10000 people who give a shit about this, want to pretend it's a huge deal, and who don't realize you can already easily turn those things off in at least one existing browser.

I'm running it in a virtual machine with only 4GB of ram right now, and it is responding very fast. Faster than firefox is outside of the VM.
I actually just dropped it down to 2GB and it is still running beautifully. I admit it is running on Linux, but still 2GB isn't much these days.

Me too. My notes on Mac:- Bing is default search engine.- The colored bar at the top changes from red to orange to blue to ??? (who wrote this, the Melnorme?)- Videos loaded and ran automatically (Booooo!)- Asked to use my Chrome Keychain upon connect.- Integrates with Google Phishing/Malware and Safe Browsing interfaces- Do not track is off by default- There's some kind of "Vivaldi Mail" sidebar ("coming soon") - do not want- There's some kind of notetaking facility (independent of current page) built in - for what purpose I do not know- The bookmarks were prepopulated with US-based (and New York / San Francisco centric) items

Adding the following:- Huge memory footprint, on par with Chrome. This is the #1 issue I have with most modern browsers and Chrome is by far the worst offender. I understand RAM is fairly cheap, but fuck, 2 GB RAM occupied with 4 tabs (GMail, Forge of Empires, Google.com main page and Slashdot) achieves full retard status.- Bookmark import works, but creates a sub-folder in the Bookmarks Bar / Imported Bookmarks rather than the expected behavior of asking whether prepopulated bookmarks should be replaced.- You can't move multiple bookmark folders to the bookmark bar although you can select multiple folders (it only moves them one by one).

Isn't the consensus that "Do Not Track" is supposed to be off by default? I think the argument goes that if it's on by default, then web developers won't take it seriously because most people who have it turned on didn't make a conscious decision to say they didn't want to be tracked. By leaving it off by default, it's sends a stronger message, that the person made a conscious decision to say they didn't want to be tracked.

Personally, I think the whole thing is stupid. I don't think that websites pay any

>>>> Do not track is off by default>> At least this statement is wrong

On a Mac, under my privacy settings, on a fresh copy of Vivaldi (which I'd never installed before), the "Preferences | Privacy | Do Not Track | Ask Websites Not to Track Me" is UNCHECKED. I'd post a screenshot if I could, but doesn't that mean "do not track is off by default?"

>> what do you mean by "bookmarks were prepopulated"?

When I opened my bookmarks on my virgin Vivaldi browser, they already had "Speed Dial",

On a Mac, under my privacy settings, on a fresh copy of Vivaldi (which I'd never installed before), the "Preferences | Privacy | Do Not Track | Ask Websites Not to Track Me" is UNCHECKED. I'd post a screenshot if I could, but doesn't that mean "do not track is off by default?"

"Do not track" is an option which MUST be off by default. If you don't understand why, you don't understand what it does. Enabling it by default actually, really, DISables it for everyone.

I was hoping for a completely new engine, or a resurrection of Opera, so I was disappointed with this especially given how disillusioned I've become with Mozilla's insanity lately. It seems every "new" browser is actually Chrome with a different veneer.

The new Opera (v. 33 or dev build 34) is based on Chromium, correct. It is vastly different and, by my guess, so far from the original that it could never be pulled back into the Chromium base. The source if available but it is not free, as in libre, if one wants to distribute it with their proprietary bits (that's my reading of the license). It is not in the repos for any distro that I'm aware of, only the older version exists there. There's no BSD version, as of yet, so that's a bit of a pisser.

We have lots of browsers with too many features. At the moment, I am staring at my Firefox session using nearly 1 GB of memory. I usually shut it down when it hits 1.5 GB. There is really no excuse for a browser to be using that much memory. Including images, each tab is probably using less than 1 MB of space. I have maybe 20 tabs open, so 20 MB seems like a reasonable amount of memory to be using.
A feature I WOULD like to see is a breakdown of memory and CPU usage by tab, so I can permanently block sites that use too much CPU or memory. Also, something which can tell me which tab is playing some audio, so I can permanently block any site that does that without being told to do that.

Moreover, even if it does, we already have to test under IE8, IE9, IE11, Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Safari on Mac if possible, Android Chrome, and iOS Safari. What difference does one more browser make? Especially a desktop browser?

Other features are in the works, such as sync and built-in mail client that will be introduced when they hit a more stable state

Can we have a browser which is, you know, just a browser?

We don't want social integrations, we don't want cross device linking, we don't need an emailclient, a chat client, something to manage our contacts, sidebars, or any of a dozen features we just turn off an ignore.

We want a browser, small, lean, standards compliant, not a memory pig, and which respects our privacy.

Stop trying to make some do-everything turd which wants to be the center of our freaking lives. We don't need another one of those.

Doesn't firefox already have notes (without an addon)? It's kind of a hassle on my touch enabled devices, actually. All browsers even ie2 have quick commands for navigating and feature use. So it's a new browser that brings tab stacking to the table!

The problem with only running javascript from a webpage's own site is that these days many web pages spread their 'site' over multiple URLs, using CDNs for jQuery and such (which could be handled with a whitelist, but can't cover everything), CSS, images, font's with icon sets, etc...
I'm sure before too long someone (let's be honest. Google.) will develop a full 'machine learning' system to learn which javascript to block, etc, automatically (and then someone will find a way to use it to end... i don't kn

Probably because the updates add suck without adding any useful new features.

I finally moved from 10.6.8 to 10.10 and honestly the only thing that really feels like an 'improvement' is that I can disable transparency in the UI. There's a whole lot of new annoying crap to deal with, though.

I've been following the snapshot diligently, and as a huge fan of Presto Opera, it's almost everything that I've been missing (still currently using Opera w/Blink). The one deal-breaker for me is the fact that a few of my absolutely extensions don't work properly.

I've been following the snapshot diligently, and as a huge fan of Presto Opera, it's almost everything that I've been missing (still currently using Opera w/Blink). The one deal-breaker for me is the fact that a few of my absolutely extensions don't work properly.

This. People here don't seem to realize that Vivaldi is the spiritual successor to Opera Presto, which was beloved by its fans in part for the features it offered. When Opera became just another simple Chrome clone, it lost that which made it special.

I hung onto Opera 12.xx as long as possible (until the major websites actively started blocking its user agent), and was so disappointed by Opera Chromium I went to Pale Moon. I've been using Vivaldi occasionally since early preview releases, and lately it's

Give the v. 33 a shot w/regards to Opera. I used Opera back in the days when I had to pay for it. It's not that bad. I hated it, at first. Oh, did I hate it. (I gotta tell ya, I was some pissed.) They have improved greatly since around the v. 28 days.

I want to like Vivaldi but now, instead of just one, I must run it with --no-gpu-composting and it fills up the terminal with a stream of errors. *sighs* I'm waiting for it to improve. I've been tracking it faithfully. I even did a small journal post on it.

Basically anything with sophisticated Javascript or AJAX. Most Google sites (Maps started reverting to a dumbed-down html version before Google forced the new Maps), Facebook, bank websites, T-Mobile's website, etc. etc. Many, many different websites would show messages along the lines of "upgrade to a modern browser to use this site." It was also really slow and unresponsive especially with many tabs open. (PC is Win7 Pro 64-bit, Core i7 with 16GB RAM, SSD).

In Opera (Presto), email client could be used as feed reader.
I don't know what if Vivaldi will be if it has, but in Opera 12, built-in feed reader (mail) has advantages, and it consumes zero additional resource.

Now Though? It's taken over a year for any extension at all to be able to be used (from it's icon). Vivaldi is closed source like everything that Jon von Tetzchner is involved in. The whole "for our friends" and placating manner seems disingenuous.

Personally, I can't stand their implementation of Tab-Stacks - it is less than useless, and just makes finding a given tab even more difficult than it already is when you have "too many" open.

Then there's the whole censorship crap that goes on in the forums - just like it always was over at Opera HQ - though perhaps the mods aren't as completely off the hook over on Opera's side these days --- though it still is prevalent.
I got banned from Vivaldi.net last week because it's auto-spam detector didn't like a forum post that did word|word|word|word. I had been a member since the beginning, had a post history over the last year+. At this point, well fuck you Vivaldi.